Effect of interphase, curvature and agglomeration of SWCNTs on mechanical properties of polymer-based nanocomposites: Experimental and numerical investigations

In this study, the elastic modulus of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs)/epoxy nanocomposite was studied using the 3D finite element method and compared with experimental results to investigate the effect of SWCNTs interphase, curvature, and agglomeration on the prediction of the elastic modulus. Nanocomposite specimens containing 0.1, 0.3, and 0.5 wt% SWCNTs were fabricated to obtain SWCNTs/epoxy elastic modulus. The elastic modulus increased until SWCNTs was incorporated up to 0.3 wt% and after that, the trend of increasing elastic modulus declined. TEM images showed that in higher contents of filler, there were some local SWCNTs agglomerations within the composites which caused a dropped in elastic modulus of specimens containing 0.5 wt% SWCNTs. Also, six different 3D representative volume element (RVE) of SWCNTs/epoxy including incorporated cylindrical, cylindrical with agglomeration, curved-cylindrical, cylindrical with inter phase, cylindrical with interphase and agglomeration and curved-cylindrical with agglomeration SWCNTs in the epoxy matrix have been generated using Digimat-FE and their elastic modulus evaluated by Digimat-FE solver. The numerical results cleared that the simplest cylindrical RVE has the greatest discrepancy with experimental results which showed the necessity of consideration of three important parameters including SWCNTs interphase, curvature, and agglomerations. By considering SWCNTs interphase and agglomeration the difference of numerical and experimental results decreased so that in specimens containing 0.1 wt% SWCNTs the error was only 6.8%. Also, the best results obtained from RVE of curved-cylindrical with agglomeration in specimen containing 0.1 wt% SWCNTs with only 4.1% error which showed the importance of considering SWCNTs agglomeration and curvature for modeling of nanocomposites.